The Staatskapelle Berlin is one of the European orchestras whose primary mission has been opera. The group has increasingly played symphonic repertory as well, but perhaps there's a dramatic orientation toward their work. Whatever the explanation, the orchestra was the perfect vehicle for Daniel Barenboim's latest thinking on the Brahms symphonies. His readings are broad and detailed, with the four symphonies differentiated almost as if they were operas. The Symphony No. 2 in D major, Op. 73, fully emerges here as the ...
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The Staatskapelle Berlin is one of the European orchestras whose primary mission has been opera. The group has increasingly played symphonic repertory as well, but perhaps there's a dramatic orientation toward their work. Whatever the explanation, the orchestra was the perfect vehicle for Daniel Barenboim's latest thinking on the Brahms symphonies. His readings are broad and detailed, with the four symphonies differentiated almost as if they were operas. The Symphony No. 2 in D major, Op. 73, fully emerges here as the Pastoral Symphony answer to the explicitly Beethovenian Symphony No. 1 in C minor, Op. 68; sample especially the finale, a massive, intoxicated dithyramb. So it is all the way through; the passacaglia finale of the Symphony No. 4 in E minor, Op. 98, is no incipient neo-Baroqueness but a sweeping piece of pure impulse (which makes sense, given that Beethoven thought of Baroque forms this way). This is arch-Romantic Brahms, untouched by contemporary minimal thinking, and it seems to have...
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